Rubella, or German measles, is a vaccine-preventable disease. Rubella infection is usually mild; however, infection in pregnancy is associated with severe outcomes for the baby, including pregnancy loss or a combination of developmental defects called congenital rubella syndrome. Within the last ten-year period, two cases of congenital rubella syndrome in Saskatchewan were reported to the provincial ministry and the Public Health Agency of Canada of the newborns of mothers who had recently arrived from Sub-Saharan Africa.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: High-quality 3D-anatomy of the day is needed for treatment plan adaptation in radiotherapy. For online x-ray-based CBCT workflows, one approach is to create a synthetic CT or to utilize a fan-beam CT with corresponding registrations. The former potentially introduces uncertainties in the dose calculation if deformable image registration is used.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis report describes the case of a frail 36-year-old patient who underwent an endovascular treatment of a right subclavian artery pseudoaneurysm (SAP) associated with an arteriovenous fistula secondary to a traumatic central venous catheter insertion. The deployment of a covered stent from the innominate to the right common carotid artery combined with coiling of the SAP and the internal mammary artery was performed. Two additional covered stents were deployed from the vertebral artery to the distal subclavian artery to preserve right upper extremity circulation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPurpose: Recent evaluations of a 3D iterative cone-beam computed tomography (iCBCT) reconstruction method available on Varian radiation treatment devices demonstrated that iCBCT provides superior image quality when compared to analytical Feldkamp-Davis-Kress (FDK) method. However, iCBCT employs statistical penalized likelihood (PL) that is known to be highly sensitive to inconsistencies due to physiological motion occurring during the acquisition. We propose a computationally inexpensive extension of iCBCT addressing this deficiency.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjectives: Thyroid dysfunction has been shown to be associated with increased all-cause mortality and severity of chronic heart failure in critical illness and severe cardiac diseases. The present study was conducted to ascertain the relationship between perioperative free triiodothyronine and free tetraiodothyronine (fT4) levels and postoperative adverse outcomes after heart transplantation (HTX).
Design: Retrospective, observational study.
SEPARATION from cardiopulmonary bypass (CPB) after cardiac surgery is a progressive transition from full mechanical circulatory and respiratory support to spontaneous mechanical activity of the lungs and heart. During the separation phase, measurements of cardiac performance with transesophageal echocardiography (TEE) provide the rationale behind the diagnostic and therapeutic decision-making process. In many cases, it is possible to predict a complex separation from CPB, such as when there is known preoperative left or right ventricular dysfunction, bleeding, hypovolemia, vasoplegia, pulmonary hypertension, or owing to technical complications related to the surgery.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis study assesses factors influencing the capacity to maintain a steady rhythm during explicit counting activities. There are three counting paces (count every 800, 1200, or 1600 ms) and three experimental conditions (count silently, aloud and aloud in the presence of someone). The study also assesses the effect of a speech disorder, namely stuttering, on this counting ability by comparing the performance of a group of adult stutterers (n = 21) to that of a group of adult non-stutterers (n = 24).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis article reviews fellowship training in adult cardiac, thoracic, and vascular anesthesia and critical care from the perspective of European program initiators and educational leaders in these subspecialties together with current training fellows. Currently, the European Association of Cardiothoracic Anaesthesiology (EACTA) network has 20 certified fellowship positions each year in 10 hosting centers within 7 European countries, with 2 positions outside Europe (São Paulo, Brazil). Since 2009, 42 fellows have completed the fellowship training.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe HeartWare HVAD is a radial rotary blood pump with a combination of passive magnetic and hydrodynamic bearings to levitate the impeller. The axial gap size between impeller and housing in this bearing and its sensitivity to speed, flow, and pressure difference is difficult to assess. Shear stresses are exceptionally high in this tiny gap making it important for blood damage and related adverse events.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRecently it was suggested that the phylogenetic clustering of Mesozoic marine reptile lineages, such as thalattosaurs, the very successful fish-shaped ichthyosaurs and sauropterygians (including plesiosaurs), among others, in a so-called 'superclade' is an artefact linked to convergent evolution of morphological characters associated with a shared marine lifestyle. Accordingly, partial 'un-scoring' of the problematic phylogenetic characters was proposed. Here we report a new, exceptionally preserved and mostly articulated juvenile skeleton of the diapsid reptile, Eusaurosphargis dalsassoi, a species previously recovered within the marine reptile 'superclade', for which we now provide a revised diagnosis.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPurpose: Currently, there are high dose rate afterloaders available that can drive two different radioactive sources simultaneously. The source-source and source-cable attenuations are not taken into account by current planning systems. The purpose of this work is to characterize these effects and their overall impact on clinically relevant metrics.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe aim of this work was to investigate how dose distributions calculated with the collapsed cone (CC) algorithm depend on the size of the water phantom used in deriving the point kernel for multiple scatter. A research version of the CC algorithm equipped with a set of selectable point kernels for multiple-scatter dose that had initially been derived in water phantoms of various dimensions was used. The new point kernels were generated using EGSnrc in spherical water phantoms of radii 5 cm, 7.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground And Purpose: The brachytherapy dose algorithm of the American Association of Physicists in Medicine Task Group (TG) Report 43 overrides all tissue materials with water. In reality, dose discrepancies will occur around tissue calcifications. This study investigates these perturbations in low dose rate prostate brachytherapy dosimetry.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPurpose: Radioactive seed orientations are usually ignored in clinical brachytherapy dosimetry for prostate implants. Associated with the anisotropic dose distribution of seeds, these orientations could cause dose differences between the planning configurations and the clinical postplanning dosimetry. This study will quantify the impact of seed orientation on the dosimetry.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFA measurement is presented of the [Formula: see text] production cross section at [Formula: see text] = 7 TeV using [Formula: see text] collision data corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 383 [Formula: see text], collected with the ATLAS experiment at the LHC. Selection of [Formula: see text](1020) mesons is based on the identification of charged kaons by their energy loss in the pixel detector. The differential cross section is measured as a function of the transverse momentum, [Formula: see text], and rapidity, [Formula: see text], of the [Formula: see text](1020) meson in the fiducial region 500 [Formula: see text] 1200 MeV, [Formula: see text] 0.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe ATLAS experiment has observed 1995 Z boson candidates in data corresponding to 0.15 nb(-1) of integrated luminosity obtained in the 2011 LHC Pb+Pb run at sqrt[s(NN)]=2.76 TeV.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFResults of a search for new phenomena in events with an energetic photon and large missing transverse momentum in proton-proton collisions at sqrt[s] = 7 TeV are reported. Data collected by the ATLAS experiment at the LHC corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 4.6 fb(-1) are used.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis Letter presents a search for magnetic monopoles with the ATLAS detector at the CERN Large Hadron Collider using an integrated luminosity of 2.0 fb(-1) of pp collisions recorded at a center-of-mass energy of sqrt[s]=7 TeV. No event is found in the signal region, leading to an upper limit on the production cross section at 95% confidence level of 1.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEur Phys J C Part Fields
August 2013
The luminosity calibration for the ATLAS detector at the LHC during collisions at [Formula: see text] in 2010 and 2011 is presented. Evaluation of the luminosity scale is performed using several luminosity-sensitive detectors, and comparisons are made of the long-term stability and accuracy of this calibration applied to the collisions at [Formula: see text]. A luminosity uncertainty of [Formula: see text] is obtained for the 47 pb of data delivered to ATLAS in 2010, and an uncertainty of [Formula: see text] is obtained for the 5.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEur Phys J C Part Fields
March 2013
The measurement of the jet energy resolution is presented using data recorded with the ATLAS detector in proton-proton collisions at [Formula: see text]. The sample corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 35 pb. Jets are reconstructed from energy deposits measured by the calorimeters and calibrated using different jet calibration schemes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFA search is presented for direct top squark pair production in final states with one isolated electron or muon, jets, and missing transverse momentum in proton-proton collisions at sqrt[s] = 7 TeV. The measurement is based on 4.7 fb(-1) of data collected with the ATLAS detector at the LHC.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFA search for direct pair production of supersymmetric top squarks (t(1)) is presented, assuming the t(1) decays into a top quark and the lightest supersymmetric particle, χ(1)(0), and that both top quarks decay to purely hadronic final states. A total of 16 (4) events are observed compared to a predicted standard model background of 13.5(-3.
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